The collaboration of the Ghanaian government with the World Bank to support the development of jobs and skills with $200 million and the plan to hold 2020 population and housing census next year are some of the leading stories in Ghanaian press on Thursday.
The Graphic reports that the government is collaborating with the World Bank to support the development of jobs and skills with an amount of $200 million in the next five years.
The Vice-President, Dr Mahamudu Bawumia, who announced this, said the project was approved by Parliament last month and it was expected to train the youth in apprenticeship, entrepreneurship and skills development.
He said the beneficiaries would also be supported with grants for their entrepreneurship projects.
Dr. Bawumia, who was addressing the youth wing of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) in Accra yesterday to commemorate the International Youth Day, said that the second component of the project would aim at supporting young job seekers to find jobs through public employment centres across the country.
The meeting, which was organised by the National Youth Wing of the party, attracted regional and national youth coordinators and their deputies.
The newspaper also reports that the Ghana Statistical Service (GSS) has now decided to hold the 2020 Population and Housing Census (PHC) next year.
According to the GSS, the COVID-19 pandemic, coupled with the “destabilisation of the population” by the political peak season had necessitated the postponement of the census to next year.
The GSS originally fixed March 15 this year for the conduct of the exercise, but it was rescheduled twice to May 15 and then to June 28, this year, with the explanation that the June 28 date was to allow for the service to conduct a mapping process and build quality data for the main census exercise.
Following the upsurge in the COVID-19 cases in the country, the GSS decided that the exercise would be done at a later date within the year.
The Times reports that a non-governmental organisation, Kandifo Institute, has launched a non-partisan project aimed at educating electorates about the history of elections in Ghana.
The project, known as the “Ghana Election Watch” can be accessed on https://ghanaelectionswatch.com also seeks to provide essential election related information and news to electorates.
Launching the website for the project in Accra, the Executive Director of the institute, Palgrave Boakye-Danquah, said the country could plunge into chaos if political actors failed to provide the right information.
According to him, Ghana’s multi-party democracy had matured since the coming into force of the 1992 Constitution and underscored the need for the country to continue to deepen the political, economic and social architecture for prosperity.
Mr. Boakye-Danquah identified lack of good leadership as the bane of Ghana’s development and said it was time the nation elect leaders with proven leadership skills and integrity to man the affairs of the nation.
The newspaper says that the Governance Research Bureau, in collaboration with Media Generals Election Command Centre, has predicted election winning strategies for both the New Patriotic Party (NPP) and the National Democratic Congress (NDC).
It observed that both parties needed to increase their average votes in their strongholds and in swing regions to clinch power in Election 2020.
According to the Bureau, the NDC can win the 2020 elections if they increase their average votes in their strongholds by 115,000, while the NPP needed to increase their average votes in swing regions by 450,000 to clinch victory.
This winning formula was prescribed by Dr. Kwame Asah-Asante and Dr. Ezekiel Nii Nortey, both resource persons from the Governance Research Bureau, while discussing the 2020 elections from perspectives of political science and statistics and was based on the Bureau’s analysis of Electoral Commission’s (EC’s) certified results of the two parties since 1992.
GIK/APA